Excuse Me, Are You Dead?

Yesterday my friend and her daughter and I walked by a homeless man. There are lots of homeless people here but this one was different. He was slumped on the ground on the side of a building with a blue plastic bag wrapped tightly around his face and head. We kept walking, and crossed the street. My friend called 911 and we saw firemen come, poke at the guy, take the bag off, help him stand up, etc. We saw the ambulance coming up the street. I guess I had a bad look on my face, because my friend's daughter kept asking me what the matter was. How do you answer that to a two year old? So I told her to ask me when she was older.

The homeless man did not get to die yesterday. It must be an absolutely exhausting life to be homeless. I feel bad for him that his life sucks so much that he wanted to die. I felt jealous when I thought he was dead, and sorry for him that he didn't get to die.

Got Blood?

Since elementary school, my brother has been best friends with a guy who is now a New York plainclothes detective. This guy is like another older brother to me. My whole family loves him, and worries about him in the line of duty.

This morning I was headed to Kennedy Airport in Queens, New York to finally come back to San Francisco after three very long weeks of living with my parents.

On the Southern State Parkway where it turns into the Cross Island/Belt Parkway, traffic was at a complete standstill. When I looked up the expressway I saw some people getting out of their cars. That's NEVER a good sign. Then I looked up, and saw a helicopter hovering. Even WORSE sign. I heard sirens.

We got onto the Cross Island in an effort to take side streets through Queens. On the radio I heard that a police officer had just been shot, right near the neighborhood we were driving through. The DJ announced that the police officer was taken to North Shore, which happens to be the hospital my dad had his open heart surgery at. The guy who'd shot the police officer had fled in a police car and gotten on... the Southern State! Yup, about 500 feet from where we were.

As we continued on Springfield to get to Kennedy Airport over thirty marked and unmarked police cars sped by us in the opposite direction, through red lights, over islands seperating traffic, sirens and lights blazing. Why? Officer down. They were all rushing to North Shore to donate blood for that officer. I knew the name of the police officer was not going to be released on the air until he was either dead (and his family was notified) or stable.

It was 5am in LA where my brother was, and I did not want to call and wake him up to tell him that his best friend had possibly been shot, especially since there would be nothing he could do in LA if he had been shot, and the odds were good it wasn't him (there are a LOT of New York cops!).

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/nyc-shot0615,0,2443286.story?coll=ny-top-headlines

It wasn't him. I was moved to tears that all these other cops, who very possibly didn't even know the one cop who was shot, dropped whatever they were doing to rush to the hospital he was at to donate blood. Before today I had never seen how powerful the words "officer down" could be. But today I did. And it was beautiful.